Russian Hackers Run Record-Breaking Online Ad-Fraud Operation
Source: Dark Reading
'Methbot' is a sophisticated cybercrime scheme that has hit major US advertisers and publishing brands and pilfered millions of dollars per day.
Cybercriminals out of Russia are behind a newly discovered massive online advertising fraud operation hiding in plain site that steals up to $5 million per day from big-name US advertisers by posing as some 6,000 major US media sites including The Huffington Post, Fortune, ESPN, CBS Sports, and Fox News, and generating fake ad impressions.
Researchers at White Ops recently spotted the so-called "Methbot" operation pilfering anywhere from $3 million to $5 million per day in what they say is the largest and most profitable online ad fraud operation in history. Methbot has been operating for three years under cover by a Russian cybercrime group that White Ops has dubbed "AFK14," with a unique twist: its own internal botnet infrastructure runs and automates the click-fraud rather than the traditional ad fraud model of infecting unsuspecting consumers to do the dirty work.
US advertisers in October alone lost a whopping $17.7 million to the criminal hackers, according to White Ops, and AFK13 made some $10.6 million.
AFK13, which is based in Russia, also employs data centers in Dallas and Amsterdam, to run its botnet via spoofed IP addresses that help them evade blacklists. The cybercrime gang created its own Web browser in order to better hide its tracks, as well as its own HTTP library.
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Read more: http://www.darkreading.com/operations/russian-hackers-run-record-breaking-online-ad-fraud-operation/d/d-id/1327753
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